The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  “Corrine is still—” I started, but I didn’t know where I was going, so I shut up.

  She pushed her chair back from the table and stood. “I told you I don’t like ex-wives.”

  I stood, too, and reached for her, but she picked up her dishes and walked into the kitchen. I left mine on the table and followed her. When she turned from the counter I was there in front of her. I could hardly stand looking into those eyes. There was pain in them. I wondered if there was pain in mine.

  Then she came to me and kissed me. She lifted herself onto the counter, opened her legs, and I moved close. I kissed her forehead, her eyes, her neck.

  “I don’t care about Corrine,” she said.

  “Shh,” I said. We kissed. But then her eyes got big and she pulled away. “What?” I said.

  An eleven-year-old boy’s voice answered from behind me. “Can I have more orange sherbet?”

  Jason stood in the hall doorway. I looked at my watch. It was 10:25. “Too late for dessert. You should be in bed.”

  He pointed at Lucinda. “Not until I see what happens here.”

  “Jason!”

  He gave me innocent eyes and said calmly, “Joe?”

  Lucinda climbed off the counter and straightened her shirt. She put a hand on my arm. “I should go home and let you get this guy into bed.”

  “I should lock this guy in—”

  She stopped me with a quick kiss. Then she scooped her jacket and car keys from the counter and headed for the front door. I shook my finger at Jason and followed her.

  “We’ve got plenty of time,” she whispered as she slipped into her jacket. “Tomorrow night. The next night. Long drawn-out school days when we should be working.”

  She stepped outside into the cold.

  When I went back into the kitchen, Jason had disappeared into his room. I went down the hall after him and knocked on his door. He was in bed, covers over his head, the lights still on. I sat on the edge of the bed.

  “That was a rotten thing to do,” I said.

  From under the covers. “You could have told her to stay.”

  “You pretty much ruined that possibility.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “You’ll understand in a few years,” I said.

  His head emerged from the covers. “I already understand.”

  “You do? Well, good, then—”

  “I probably know more about it than you do.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said.

  “Look, you’re eleven years old and—”

  He propped himself on his elbows. “Some kids in my class are doing it.”

  I thought about that. “You?”

  He looked disgusted. “Who would I do it with?”

  This was making me sweat. “I don’t know. Any of the girls you like.” He narrowed his eyes and smirked. “Or boys . . . I mean, whatever you—”

  He laughed at me. “You’re so weird.”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Did you know female aphids can have babies without mating with a male?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “See?”

  “See what?”

  “I told you I know more about it than you.”

  “I think you know a lot about a lot of things,” I said, and I flipped off his light.

  When I got to his door, he said, “Did you know aphids start having babies when they’re one week old?”

  “Good night, Jason,” I said.

  “I told you so.”

  EIGHTEEN

  I GOT INTO BED at 11:00 and tried to take my mind off Lucinda. Thinking about Corrine was no better. I wanted to get back together with Corrine, but I screwed up every chance I got. Being with Lucinda was good and easy, or at least easier. Maybe I should wake up Jason and ask his advice.

  I thought about Judy Terrano, dead with a black-cat tattoo and black-marker graffiti on her belly. That didn’t help me sleep. I imagined her at age eighteen or nineteen, looking like she did in the picture propped on my dresser. What did she think about when she stood in front of a mirror, knowing that boys and men would do anything—anything at all—to be close to her? No matter what she did, she could have them all.

  Sometime after midnight, I slept. I dreamed that Lucinda and I were in my kitchen having sex, her on the counter, me standing on the floor. I heard a noise behind me. A teenaged Judy Terrano stood in the hall doorway. She was naked and she laughed at us with the laughter of an angel. I jarred awake in the middle of the night.

  The phone was ringing. My bedroom was dark and the glowing red on the clock said 2:23. In my night fear, I felt sure that a phone ringing at two in the morning must bring news of a death.

  I grabbed at the receiver and said hello.

  A voice mumbled at me.

  I started to hang up, then returned the phone to my ear. “Who is this?” I said.

  “Geg Sanuelson.” A voice sputtered out of half a mouth.

  “Greg Samuelson! What the hell—Where are you?”

  “You office.”

  “Mine? How did you get in?”

  He said nothing.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Talk—to you.”

  “Fine. Talk to me about Judy Terrano.”

  “Need—to—talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Noney.”

  Nunny? Judy Terrano? Then I realized—“Money?” With no bottom lip, he couldn’t say M.

  “I need.”

  I thought about the five thousand dollars I’d locked in a file drawer. If Samuelson had broken into my office, why hadn’t he found it, too? “Stay where you are. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  When I hung up, I sat in bed half-awake. I’d told Stan Fleming that I would call him if I heard from Greg Samuelson. No reason that I shouldn’t call him now. I was pretty sure he was smarter than I was and would handle Samuelson better. But I didn’t call him.

  I got up and put on jeans and a sweatshirt, strapped on my shoulder holster, popped a loaded clip into my Glock, and slid the gun into the holster. I saw plenty of reasons to think Greg Samuelson was innocent, and I saw just as many to be ready to put a second bullet in his head.

  I left a note on the kitchen counter telling Jason that I needed to go out but promising to be back in time to make him breakfast before school. I’d broken promises like that before and I wondered what they meant to him and why I made them. I wondered what breaking them made me. I grabbed a four pack of Red Bull from the refrigerator and slipped through the back door into the night. The night was quiet. After exchanging head wounds with me, Robert and Jarik had apparently gone home to put on Band-Aids. I sighed in the night air and felt my body come awake and alert.

  I cruised east on Montrose under the El tracks and past Teldan’s Bail-Bond Agency and a string of Mexican restaurants that stayed open every night until 2:00 A.M., then snapped closed, lights out. I popped the tab on a can of Red Bull, downed it, waited for the rush of caffeine. At the corner of Clark Street, the wind whipped from the north and made a metal road-repair sign shudder. I turned south on Lake Shore Drive and punched the gas. Ten minutes later I pulled to the curb outside my office. Eight stories up, my office light was on, the only light in the building.

  I drew my gun and rode the elevator.

  Samuelson sat behind my desk, like he was moving in. He’d torn away most of the bandages the hospital had put on him, but he’d left a packing of white gauze, which hung to his face with drying blood and something yellow and oily. His mouth, what was left of it, trembled. His glazed eyes turned slowly to look at me. His skin glistened with sickly sweat.

  “If you stay out of prison and out of the mental ward,” I said, “a reconstructive surgeon is going to put a kid through college on that face.”

  He responded with a grunt that was half liquid.

  The file drawer with the five thousand doll
ars in it was closed. It didn’t look like he’d broken into it. On top of the file cabinet, my coffeemaker steamed. Maybe Samuelson really was planning to move in. I poured myself a cup and sat in one of my client chairs.

  “You’re going to die if you don’t get to a doctor.”

  He shrugged like it didn’t matter.

  “If you don’t care, why are you haunting me in the middle of the night?”

  He gave me a glassy stare and managed to spit out a noise that again sounded like “Noney.”

  “Money.”

  He nodded.

  “For what?”

  He said nothing.

  I said, “You know where you should go? The police. They’ll take care of you, get your chin fixed up, and you won’t need money.”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t get it. It’s not like you’re booking a flight to Mexico. What do you want?”

  He struggled and said it again. “Noney.” His mouth trembled. Talking hurt.

  I wanted to hit him. “Yeah, money. What for?”

  The glassy stare.

  I took a deep drink of coffee. It tasted bitter but not as bad as I’d sometimes drunk.

  “No one’s giving you money, Greg. How’d you get here anyway? You’ve got to have cash to get around the city.”

  He raised his hands and held an imaginary steering wheel.

  “You steal a car?”

  He managed to say, “Ai—ny.”

  Amy. A shiver ran down my neck. Samuelson’s wife. He’d burned her boyfriend’s car. I didn’t know what he would do to her. “You went to her house?”

  He sputtered, “Ny—house.”

  “Okay, your house. What did you do to her? You hurt her?”

  Hate shined through the glassy eyes. “Ass-hole.” His face shook in pain. He closed his eyes until the worst seemed to pass. Then he managed, “Gone.”

  “She was gone?”

  He nodded.

  “Without taking her car?”

  He shrugged.

  I shook my head, and my exhaustion was dizzying. I should’ve brought another Red Bull from the car. “So you went to the condo and got, what, some clothes, the car, and, by the look in your eyes, something from the medicine cabinet?”

  “Co”—he rested—“deine.”

  “And then you hung out all day waiting for her so you could hit her up for cash. But she didn’t come home, and so you called me?”

  He nodded.

  I shook my head again, sipped from the coffee. “Okay,” I said, “my advice is we arrange for you to turn yourself in. You’re in more danger out than in. It’s your best—”

  “No.”

  The clarity of his voice stopped me short. I looked at him closely. “Did you kill Judy Terrano?”

  Again clear. “No.”

  I watched to see if he was lying. But his glassy eyes and trembling face told me only that he was hurting.

  “Did you shoot yourself?”

  The smallest focus remained in his eyes, and the focus looked like hate. “ ’uck”—he trembled—“you.”

  “Yeah? Fuck you, too,” I said. His glassy eyes were like mirrors. I felt a buzzing rush but steadied myself. “Tell me about the hundred ninety thousand dollars she stole from the church.”

  He shook his head like he was disgusted with me, but he didn’t tell me to fuck off—he flipped his middle finger at me.

  “Okay, then tell me about her tattoo.”

  He looked confused, but he might be faking stupid.

  “The black cat tattoo,” I told him.

  His shaking head said he had no idea what I was talking about.

  “The bad kitty on her belly.”

  The confusion lifted and he trembled. He smiled. It’s possible for a man with only an upper jaw to smile but it’s nothing you ever want to see.

  “You know about the tattoo?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “You know about the BAD KITTY?”

  He ignored the question. He struggled to get up from the desk chair but failed.

  I shook my head and felt another buzzing rush. “I’m going to drive you to the hospital. You’ll be safer off the street.”

  This time he managed to get out of the chair. He stumbled around the desk. A dying nun could tackle him in the shape he was in. All I needed to do was stand up and block the door out of my office.

  I stood and my head spun. My vision narrowed. I would pass out if I didn’t sit. I sat. My vision cleared, some of it, and my head got off the carnival ride. Samuelson stood at the edge of the desk and watched me like he was a kid and I was a bug whose wings he’d clipped. I tried to stand again and got halfway up before I had to sit. He watched me and I shook my head. My head spun. I felt nauseous. “Damn,” I said. “What’s in the coffee?”

  “Xan—ax. Lots.”

  “Xanax,” I managed to repeat for no reason at all except I had no thoughts of my own and felt like I never would again.

  He looked almost sorry.

  “You bastard,” I said, and tried to throw the rest of the coffee at him. I poured it down my leg.

  The buzzing rushed through my head, then a fast, woozy calm.

  My eyes closed themselves.

  I fought to figure out what was happening. Samuelson looked sorry for something—tying up my mind in a knot, leaving me in a chair with drool running down my chin, serving me a bad cup of coffee. Whatever he was sorry for I was missing it. I’d disappeared down a drain into a hard, dreamless sleep. I was gone and I missed his apology.

  I woke once with a shiver on the floor next to the chair and got sucked down the drain into sleep again. Later, I woke again, shivered—slept. A third time, I woke and fought clear of the drain, though it sucked at me like it wanted me forever. I felt a sock in my mouth and when I tried to spit it out it was my tongue. I needed my tongue. Or I would need it. Sometime. Some day.

  I squinted at my watch. It was 5:20 in the morning. Less than two and a half hours had passed. Xanax still was pumping through my brain.

  I peered around the office. Samuelson was gone. My ring of keys hung out from the lock on the file cabinet where I’d stashed the money that Robert and Jarik had paid me. I crawled to the cabinet and looked in. No surprise—the money was gone.

  I felt my pockets. Samuelson had taken my wallet. I felt the rest of my clothes. He’d lied to me. He’d wanted more than money. He’d taken my gun, too.

  I rested on the floor and tried to think clearly. After a few minutes I figured out that Samuelson hadn’t taken my gun to shoot himself, at least not immediately. He could have killed himself a dozen ways without going to the trouble to get it. Who else would he use the gun on? His wife Amy? Eric Stone? William DuBuclet?

  I figured DuBuclet could cover himself. Eric Stone was doubtful. Amy Samuelson more so.

  Was Greg Samuelson a killer? With his back against the wall, maybe he would kill. And his back was definitely against a wall. Did he kill Judy Terrano? Did he kill the priest in her room? I couldn’t see it. But I hadn’t seen him drugging and robbing me either, not until it was too late. Why would he kill? Stan Fleming had said that his marriage was over, his job was about to go, and he had nothing to lose. Maybe he wanted company as the game ended.

  I pushed myself onto my hands and knees. I needed to get to Amy Samuelson. If her husband was going after her, he was going after her with my gun.

  I needed to move fast. But my body and mind were soaked blankets. So now would be a good time to call Stan. He could have a cruiser at the Samuelsons’ condo in the time it took me to drag myself downstairs to my car. I stood up. Nausea swilled through my stomach and my vision narrowed but I held myself until my eyes cleared. I leaned against the desk. I squinted at it. My wallet was on it. Samuelson had removed fifty bucks and the credit cards.

  He’d also removed the check Eric Stone had written to me. It sat next to the wallet on the desk. Ripped into eight pieces.

  The credit cards might get him a
one-way ticket to Mexico, the fifty bucks a plaster marker for his grave when he died there from his head wound. But the five thousand he’d taken from the file drawer would get him more, maybe a twelve-piece orchestra for the funeral.

  I paced the room, leaning against the walls, panting, knees weak. The office couch looked like the best bed I’d ever seen. I wanted to lie on it and sleep until the day passed and then I wanted to sleep there until spring.

  I paced some more.

  I paced until I knew the pacing would do me no more good.

  I stumbled out of the office and returned. I got the pot of coffee and poured it out the window, watching the steam rise into the dark.

  NINETEEN

  CIRCUS CLOWNS WERE SITTING on my feet, hugging my knees. I tried to kick them off, but they rode the elevator down with me and came with me to the car. I collapsed onto the driver’s seat, slapped my cheeks, and guzzled a can of Red Bull.

  My car rolled back up Wabash at a scary speed. The speedometer read twenty. The city lights glared as if stars had fallen from the sky and were burning cold on earth. Nausea tumbled through my belly as the Red Bull played with the Xanax. When the nausea passed, I got reckless and inched up to twenty-five.

  A couple of minutes before six, I pulled into a fire lane in front of Samuelson’s condo. Across the street, the window of Tommy Cheng’s Chinese Restaurant was gray, the stools stacked upside down on the counter by the window. A few of Samuelson’s early rising neighbors walked through the half light, freshly showered, wearing business suits, looking like they’d spent the night on something more comfortable than my office floor. After a while a middle-aged woman came out of the metal security gate to Samuelson’s condo block. I wished her good morning and slipped through the gate into a bricked walkway. She hesitated, looking at me like I was a junkie.

  Exterior stairs took me to a second-floor landing and a corridor that led to Samuelson’s door. It was a nice door: solid wood, inlaid with parallel panels of frosted glass fitted together in a thin metal framework. There were two locks, one of them good. A jiggle of the door handle said at least one of the locks was doing its job. If my mind had been clear and I’d been carrying the right tools, I could have worked the locks in twenty or thirty minutes. I stumbled back down the stairs, found a chunk of decorative granite in the bushes by the walkway, and returned. I wrapped the stone in my jacket sleeve and punched the glass panel closest to the locks. The glass cracked, and the panel bent inward. Two more punches drew the metal framework from its wooden housing. I pushed the framework further, reached in, tumbled the locks, and let myself in.